Coon Rapids Card-Capades Voter Fraud?

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It’s election time here at Coon Rapids High School, and this election cycle has been filled with scandals and alleged discrimination running rampant around the school. It all started as an innocent election for the school’s “MORP” royalty, where students could vote during their lunch period for the lucky guy and girl to represent their grade. The student body chooses one guy and girl in grades 9,10, and 11, but in the senior class, students choose a group of four guys and four girls for the senior class royal court; of that group of seniors, each will have a chance to be voted as the king and queen for the dance.

Unfortunately, something went wrong with the voting this year. Students were able to submit multiple votes under the same email, meaning any student would have the power to vote as many times as they would like for any person they chose. This is where the problems arose. For the senior class there was a staggering 800+ votes, and when the senior class is only about 420 people that revealed an obvious problem. So the decision was made to completely scrap the first vote for the senior class and reformat the ballot in a way that restricted each student to only one vote, as was initially intended.

To nobody’s surprise, rumors arose around the reason behind this need for a second vote. People came forward claiming they saw various students voting multiple times, for themselves or for others. In this whirlwind of gossip and innuendo, there were three names that repeatedly came up in conversations. Of those three, one chose not to comment in any way, but the other two, who will be referred to as Bert and/or Ernie, spoke freely.

Both stated that they had heard the rumors of the repeated voting. Bert also stated that he was gone on the final day of voting so he wouldn’t have been able to vote repeatedly to such an extreme extent. Ernie also said that he had no part of it.

The fairness of the second vote was the next point in question. Bert believed the second vote was fair and everything was handled properly by the administration. Ernie saw things a little differently. He believed the ballot was itself was fair, but that the administration handled the situation poorly. He believed the voting should have just been left as is and saved the headache of the second ballot to save the drama that followed.

The second vote was a fair way to handle a miscount or a mistake in voting set-up, and in any other situation it would be the right decision. However, given that this took place in a high school, where rumors quickly start and drama is forever present, it would have been more prudent to remove votes that were submitted from the same email, or if a large sum of votes for the same two people occured in a similar time frame. That is assuming the votes are time stamped, of which I cannot be sure. But regardless of my opinion it is also a blessing that this took place in high school for the same reason. Rumors spread faster than fire so this too will burn out and all be forgotten. Which for those involved will be a relief.

Postscript

This portion of this article was written after the Card-capades coronation. And as a student and the author of this I would like to congratulate Cristian Johnson, and Paige Fossland for being voted as the King and Queen for this dance.